BACKGROUND Owing to the emergence of some challenges in the demographic structure of many countries and possible decrease in young human workforce in the future decades, the reduction in the fertility rate has become a major public concern. This study aimed to investigate the effects of climatic factors on fertility. AIM In this correlational study conducted during 2005-2009, the relationship...

Water in the XXI century has become the primary factor for sustainable development, eradication of poverty and reversal of ecosystem degradation. Increasing water demand for agriculture and urbanisation, combined with pollution, eutrophication and amplification of the stochastic character of climatic processes, increases water limitations for ecosystems and societies. The transdisciplinary scie...

The aim of our study was to reveal biogeographical patterns in the native vascular flora of Iceland and to define ecological factors responsible for these patterns. We analysed dataset of more than 500,000 records containing information on the occurrence of vascular plants. Analysis of ecological factors included climatic (derived from WORLDCLIM data), topographic (calculated from digital eleva...

Ecological theory asserts that the climate of a region exerts top-down controls on regional ecosystem patterns and processes, across space and time. To provide empirical evidence of climatic controls, it would be helpful to define climatic regions that minimized variance in key climate attributes, within climatic regions—define the periods and features of climatic regimes, and then look for con...

The rate of climatic-niche evolution is important to many research areas in ecology, evolution, and conservation biology, including responses of species to global climate change, spread of invasive species, speciation, biogeography, and patterns of species richness. Previous studies have implied that clades with higher rates of climatic-niche evolution among species should have species with nar...

Geographic patterns in body size are often associated with latitude, elevation, or environmental and climatic variables. This study investigated patterns of body size and cell size of the green anole lizard, Anolis carolinensis, and potential associations with geography or climatic variables. Lizards were sampled from 19 populations across the native range, and body size, red blood cell size an...

The high biological production of the California Current System (CCS) results from the seasonal development of equatorward alongshore winds that drive coastal upwelling. While several climatic fluctuation patterns influence the dynamics and biological productivity of the CCS, including the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), the Pacific Decadal Oscillation index (PDO) and the North Pacific Gyr...

Long-distance migration in birds is relatively well studied in nature; however, one aspect of this phenomenon that remains poorly understood is the pattern of distribution presented by species during arrival to and establishment of wintering areas. Some studies suggest that the selection of areas in winter is somehow determined by climate, given its influence on both the distribution of bird sp...

Differences in life-history traits between tropical and temperate lineages are often attributed to differences in their climatic niche dynamics. For example, the more frequent appearance of migratory behaviour in temperate-breeding species than in species originally breeding in the tropics is believed to have resulted partly from tropical climatic stability and niche conservatism constraining t...